A Rabbit's Review 9/3/2010

A Rabbit's Review
by LisaMary Wichowski

Note: A Rabbits Review column replaces The Educated Rabbit column with Sheri's retirement. Do you have a suggested book or website for Mary to review? If so, send an email to your Editor.

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The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds

By Marilyn Yalom,
Photographs by Reid S. Yalom
Houghton Mifflin, 336 pp., $30

Books about death by their very nature tend to come from deep within an author, and Marilyn Yalom's The American Resting Place is no exception. As for many of us, it is the lives represented in the burial places she visits, the lives of the dead, that draw her in. However, her interest is not merely personal: Yalom succeeds in representing American history and geographic expansion, conveyed through a sense of place, time and group identity.

In a three year mother-son trip from New England through the South and onward to Hawaii Marilyn and Reid Yalom leave no doubt that burial grounds can be a significant tool in understanding sociological identity and change.

Marilyn Yalom, a senior Scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the author of three prior books that link cultural ideas to historical processes (A History of the Breast (1998); A History of the Wife (2002); Birth of the Chess Queen (2004)), is quite practiced in well-done, readable histories. Reid Yalom is a San Francisco based fine art photographer whose first book of photographs, Colonial Noir: Photographs From Mexico, was published by Stanford University Press in the spring of 2004 and whose photographs have been exhibited at galleries in San Francisco and New York. As in Let us Now Praise Famous Men the “parallel narrative” of photographs does not merely support the story, they are truly an integral part of the work, a tale of images hand in hand with the portfolio of written impressions.

The largest portion of the book is a selection of individual cemeteries that are both examples of the evolution of the social context and at the same time artistic expression of death. These sometimes iconic, sometimes closely held, burial places takes us through colonial practices, grave labeling, community identity and group cohesion in the graveyard and the process of the removal of death from American life. Later chapters reveal regional differences as well as the development of the art and culture of cemeteries, with a final chapter focusing on the patterns of change in how we build and experience cemeteries. This is quite a bit of material for one book; there are discussions of First Peoples burial practices; those of the Eastern Seaboard colonists’; Spanish Missions in both Texas and California, Nineteenth century urban cemeteries; Catholic grounds in Chicago, St Louis and New Orleans. There is even a chapter on military cemeteries.

Despite this breadth, there are enough details that weave her argument together. African-Americans are not consigned to details about burials but acknowledged as agents in their own rights, such as in the stonecutting shops of Newport. The New York congregation of Shearith Israel’s cemetery (1682-1831) is used to show how much real estate can matter. At its height the burial ground covered all of Chatham Square. The city of New York ran streets through the cemetery in the early 19th century, and at midcentury extended the Bowery, moving over 200 graves.

The writing is spare, yet in its own way creates vivid mental images of the places visited better than anything more florid would. In her discussion of the changing ethnic makeup of Chicago’s Mt Olive she tells us of “Crosses and Madonnas, photos of the deceased, and sentimental epitaphs enliven the mournful grounds. We stood silently before the tombstone… her epitaph says it all:

“WE LOVE
YOU
SADGIRL
2001”

This clarity of prose. is well echoed by Reid Yalom’s photographs. His touch, as in his images of the mausoleum at Hollywood Forever, can be almost abstract, while the image of the Charles Balmer stone in Bellefontaine of St Louis proves surprisingly intimate. And different from these in turn is the shot of the memorial to Dred Scott, journalistic and yet historic.

Like many cemeteries I have visited, The American Resting Place is easy to wander through, but well worth the care of a slow, attentive visit.

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LisaMary Wichowski
Portland, OR
Taphopolis.com

LisaMary is finishing her MA in Labor History at UIChicago. She plans on completing her PhD in American Studies with a dissertation on ethnicity and death rituals, that is, tracing patterns of assimilation through how we honor our departed. Her interest in cemeteries is part of her heart and mind. LM's heart loves them for the tales they tell us about individuals, her mind for the stories they share about our community and culture.